"How much better you appear this morning, George," she cried, in a voice whose melody was even heightened by its gaiety. "We shall soon have you among us once more, and then, heedless one, beware how you trifle again with that best of heaven's gifts, your health. Oh, this is a blessed climate! our summer atones with its mildness for the dreariness and perils of our winter; it has even given me a colour, pale-face as I am—I can feel it burn on my cheek."
He raised his head from its musing position at the first sounds of her voice, and smiled faintly, and with an expression of anguish, as she proceeded; but when she had ended, and taken her seat near him, still keeping her eyes on his varying countenance, he took her hand into his own before he replied. A good deal surprised at his manner, and at this act, which exceeded the usual familiarity of even their affectionate intercourse, the colour, of which Miss Henley had been so playfully boasting, changed once or twice with rapid transitions.
"Seem I so well, dear Charlotte?" he at length said in a low, tremulous, and hollow voice, "seem I so well? I believe you are right, and that I shall shortly be better—much better."
"What mean you, George? feel you any worse? have I disturbed you with my presence and my thoughtless gaiety?"
The young man smiled again, but the expression of his face was no longer mingled with a look of anguish; it was a kind benevolent gleam of gratitude and affection which crossed his ghastly features, like a ray of sunshine enlivening the gloom of a day in winter.
"You disturb me, Charlotte!" he answered, his very voice trembling as if in sympathy with his frame: "I do believe but for you I should have been long since in my grave."
"No, no, George, this is too melancholy a theme for us both just now; let us talk of your returning health."
He pressed her hand to his heart before he replied—"My health will never return; I am lost to this world; and in fact at this moment I properly belong to another in my body: would to God that I was purely so in feelings also."
"Surely, George, you are alarming yourself unnecessarily."
"I am not alarmed," he replied; "I have too long foreseen this event, to feel alarmed at my approaching dissolution—no, for that, blessed be my God and my Redeemer, I am in some degree prepared; but I feel it impossible to shake off the feelings of this life while the pulse continues to beat, and yet the emotions I now experience must be in some measure allied to heaven; they are not impure, they are not selfish; nothing can partake of either, dear Charlotte, where your image is connected with the thoughts of a future world."